Hasta La Gadget!

Others may look back on the years 2000 to 2009 and remember elections, wars, global warming and Michael Jackson, but for gearheads like us, this was the decade that mobile tech grew up.

During the first decade of the 21st century, we saw a whole slew of new mobile technologies capture the public imagination: the smartphone, the MP3 player, the USB stick, touchscreens, Wi-Fi, 3G wireless, pocket camcorders, digital SLRs and more.

Thanks to these inventions, people got increasingly plugged into an always-on, totally portable, always-connected existence. Where we stand now, notebooks outsell desktop PCs, people spend more on mobile phones than on landlines, and portable game consoles outnumber the ones plugged into your TV cabinet.

The products on this list exemplify that trend. While not every gadget here is portable (and many of them are gaming consoles — sorry, we can’t help it if the most exciting hardware innovations are poured into the videogame industry), the arc of the decade clearly reflects an increasingly mobile world.

From the PlayStation 2 to the Kindle 2, what follows are the best gadgets of each year in the “aughts.”

2000: PlayStation 2

Console gaming in the late 1990s kind of sucked. Sure, there was the Nintendo 64, the Sega Dreamcast and, of course, the original Sony PlayStation. But none of these rigs possessed the trifecta of deep game libraries, awesome graphics and multimedia functionality.

Then, at the turn of the millennium, Sony dropped a 100-megaton bomb it dubbed PlayStation 2.

Rich catalog of fun titles? Check. Top-notch graphics? Double-check. Multimedia functionality. Hello, hat trick. The PS2 also flaunted backward compatibility for OG PlayStation games, and it had easily upgradeable memory. Even mass shortages at launch couldn’t hamper the system’s popularity: Folks shelled out more than a thousand bucks for them on eBay.

A decade later the PS2 is the highest selling console in history with more than 138 million units sold. And it’s still growing, even though it’s technically obsolete. Case redesigns, price drops and seemingly unstoppable game-library expansion have virtually assured that the console will remain fresh for years to come. Hell, we just might ask Santa for a slimline PS2 this year. – Daniel Dumas